One evening when the twins had brought me a bulky packet of letters I had been sitting reading them in the twilight kitchen for some time when I was roused by the urgent excitement of their cries from the beach. I went out to a scene that is as fresh in my mind now as though it were hours rather than years that lay between.
The sun was very low; the shadow of the house lay long and dark across the grass and the rushes, while the hillside above glowed golden as though seen through orange lenses. The bracken no longer looked green nor the heather purple; all that gave back their own colour to the sun were the scarlet rowanberries, as vivid as venous blood. When I turned to the sea it was so pale and polished that the figures of the twins thigh-deep in the shallows showed in almost pure silhouette against it, bronze-coloured limbs and torsos edged with yellow light. They were shouting and laughing and dancing and scooping up the water with their hands, and all the time as they moved there shot up from the surface where they broke it a glittering spray of small gold and silver fish, so dense and brilliant as to blur the outline of the childish figures. It was as though the boys were the central décor of a strangely lit baroque fountain, and when they bent to the surface with cupped hands a new jet of sparks flew upward where their arms submerged, and fell back in brittle, dazzling cascade.
When I reached the water myself it was like wading in silver treacle; our bare legs pushed against the packed mass of little fish as against a solid and reluctantly yielding obstacle. To scoop and to scatter them, to shout and to laugh, were as irresistible as though we were treasure hunters of old who had stumbled upon a fabled emperor’s jewel vaults and threw diamonds about us like chaff. We were fish-drunk, fish-crazy, fish-happy in that shining orange bubble of air and water; the twins were about thirteen years old and I was about thirty-eight, but the miracle of the fishes drew from each of us the same response.
We were so absorbed in making the thronged millions of tiny fish into leaping fireworks for our delight that it was not for some minutes that I began to wonder what had driven this titanic shoal of herring fry – or soil, as they are called in this part of the world – into the bay, and why, instead of dispersing outwards to sea, they became moment by moment ever thicker in the shallows. Then I saw that a hundred yards out the surface was ruffled by flurries of mackerel whose darting shoals made a sputter of spray on the smooth swell of the incoming tide. The mackerel had driven the fry headlong before them into the narrow bay and held them there, but now the pursuers too were unable to go back. They were in turn harried from seaward by a school of porpoises who cruised the outermost limit of their shoals, driving them farther and farther towards the shore. Hunter and hunted pushed the herring soil ever inward to the sand, and at length every wavelet broke on the beach with a tumble of silver sprats. I wondered that the porpoises had not long since glutted and gone; then I saw that, like the fry and the mackerel that had pursued them into the bay, the porpoises’ return to the open waters of the sound was cut off. Beyond them, black against the blanched sunset water, rose the towering sabre fin of a bull killer whale, the ultimate enemy of sea creatures great and small, the unattackable; his single terrible form controlling by its mere presence the billions of lives between himself and the shore.
The sun went down behind the Cuillin and the water grew cold and the tide crawled grey up the beach, clogged with its helpless burden of fish, and long after the distance had become too dim to see the killer’s fin we could hear the putter of the rushing mackerel as they moved in with the tide. When it was nearly dark we fetched buckets and dipped them in the sea’s edge; they came up heavy in our hands, full not of water but of thumb-length fish.
In the morning it was dead low tide, and the sea, as still as a mountain tarn as far as the eye could reach, had gone back some two hundred yards. The tide-wrack of high-water mark lay right along the slope of white sand under the dunes, but that morning it was not dark like a tarry rope ringing the bay; it gleamed blue-grey and white with the bodies of millions upon millions of motionless minnow-sized fish. The gulls had gorged themselves when the sun rose; they sat silent, hunched and distended, in long rows on the wet sand a little to seaward, their shadows still long and formal under the low sun that glared over the hill.
I gathered a few more buckets of the fry, and kept them as cool as I could in the heat of that sunny September. But manna, like everything else, should be of at least fifty-seven varieties; when heaven sends bounty it too often sends monotony. The first meal of fried whitebait had the delight of novelty and of windfall, akin to the pleasure that for the first few days I take in some humble but new treasure harvested from the shore after gales; the second had lost little, but the sixth and seventh were cloying, while there were still three buckets full. Jonnie, who entertained an unnatural passion for fish of all kinds, ate more than I did, but the level in the buckets seemed never to diminish; a guest came to stay and we made them into fish-cakes and fish-pies, into kedgerees and fish-soups, into curries and savouries, until at last one merciful morning they began to smell. Then we used them to bait the lobster-pots, but after a while even the lobsters seemed to grow weary of them.
It so happened that about that time I made one of my rare shopping journeys to Inverness. The second item on the hotel luncheon menu was fried whitebait, and the dining-room was rich with the once-appetizing aroma. I left that hotel as might one who had perceived a corpse beneath his table, and it was some two years before I could eat whitebait again.
5
The smaller members of the whale tribe are a feature of every summer at Camusfeàrna. Sometimes the great whales, the blue and the rorquals, pass majestically through the Sound beyond the lighthouse, but they never came into the bay, for only at the highest tides would there be water enough to float their fantastic bulk.
Of all sea creatures whales hold for me a particular fascination, stemming, perhaps, from the knowledge of their enormously developed brains coupled with the unguessable, pressing, muffled world in which they pass their lives. So highly convoluted are those brains that it has been suggested that were it not for their frustrating limbless-ness they might well have outstripped man in domination of the earth’s surface. Yet there are an incredible number of people who, because of the superficial similarities of bulk and habitat, confuse them with the great sharks whose brains are minute and rudimentary. Although from early times whaling men have had strange tales to tell of their quarry’s extraordinary mental powers it is only comparatively recently that these things have become accepted fact. The American ‘oceanariums’ have allowed their porpoise and dolphin inmates to reveal themselves as highly intelligent, amiable, and playful personalities who evince an unexpected desire to please and cooperate with human beings. They will play ball games with their attendants, come up out of the water to greet them, and retrieve with obvious pleasure ladies’ handbags and kindred objects that have accidentally fallen into their tank. They are also capable of unquestionable altruism to one another; like many animals, but perhaps even more than most, their behaviour compares very favourably with that of the human species. Yet for the oil in the blubber that insulates them from the cold of polar seas man has from the earliest days reserved for the whales the most brutal and agonizing death in his armoury, the harpoon buried deep in living flesh.
Until very lately zoologists held that whales were dumb, and both the system of communication that made possible concerted action by widely separated individuals, and the ‘sixth sense’ by which they could detect the presence of objects in water too murky for vision, remained undiscovered. We have long laboured under an obtuse presupposition that the senses by which other living creatures perceive their world must to a great extent resemble our own; but in fact we are, by scientific invention, only beginning to approach methods of perception that the whales always owned as their birthright. Not only can they hear sounds four times higher than the upper limit the human ear can detect, but they possess a highly developed system closely akin to our own recently discover
ed radar, sending out a constant stream of supersonic notes whose returning ‘echoes’ inform them of the whereabouts, size, and possibly much more as yet unguessed information, of all objects within their range. Underwater recording devices have now also established that members of the whale tribe keep up an almost continual conversational chatter among themselves, sounds that are seldom if ever uttered by a single whale with no other near him.
Because man could not hear them, man assumed that they were dumb. If a whale’s cry of pain when struck with a harpoon had been audible it is just possible, but only just, that man would have felt more self-hatred in their slaughter; though the sight of two adult whales trying to keep the blow-hole of a wounded calf above water has failed to change the attitude of whaler to whale.
It is not, of course, easy for the casual shore visitor or boat passenger to deduce from the discreet, momentarily glimpsed fin of a porpoise all these complex and stimulating attributes of its owner; surprisingly few people, in fact, appear even to know that a porpoise is a whale.
The porpoises, six-foot lengths of sturdy grace, are the commonest of all the whale visitors to the Camusfeàrna bay. Unlike the rumbustious dolphins they are shy, retiring creatures, and one requires leisure and patience to see more of them than that little hooked fin that looks as if it were set on the circumference of a slowly revolving wheel; leisure to ship the oars and remain motionless, and patience to allow curiosity to overcome timidity. Then the porpoises will blow right alongside the boat, with a little gasp that seems of shocked surprise, and at these close quarters the wondering inquisitiveness of their eyes shows as plainly as it can in a human face, a child’s face as yet uninhibited against the display of emotion. The face, like the faces of all whales but the killer, appears good-humoured, even bonhomous. But they will not stay to be stared at, and after that quick gasp they dive steeply down into the twilight; they go on about their own business, and will not linger to play as do the dolphins.
One summer a school of seventeen bottle-nosed dolphins spent a whole week in the Camusfeàrna bay, and they would seem almost to hang about waiting for the boat to come out and play with them. They never leapt and sported unless the human audience was close at hand, but when we were out among them with the outboard motor they would play their own rollicking and hilarious games of hide-and-seek with us, and a sort of aquatic blind-man’s-buff, in which we in the boat were all too literally blind to them, and a target for whatever surprises they could devise. The beginning followed an invariable routine; they would lead, close-packed, their fins thrusting from the water with a long powerful forward surge every five or ten seconds, and we would follow to see how close we could get to them. When we were within fifty feet or so there would be a sudden silence while, unseen, they swooped back under the boat to reappear dead astern of us. Sometimes they would remain submerged for many minutes, and we would cut the engine and wait. This was the dolphins’ moment. As long as I live, and whatever splendid sights I have yet to see I shall remember the pure glory of the dolphins’ leap as they shot up a clear ten feet out of the sea, one after the other, in high parabolas of flashing silver at the very boat’s side. At the time it gave me a déjà vu sensation that I could not place; afterwards I realized that it recalled irresistibly the firing in quick succession of pyrotechnic rockets, the tearing sound of the rockets’ discharge duplicated by the harsh exhalation of air as each dolphin fired itself almost vertically from the waves.
In this school of dolphins there were some half a dozen calves, not more than four or five feet long as against their parents’ twelve. The calves would keep close alongside their mothers’ flanks – the right-hand side always – and I noticed that when the mothers leapt they kept their acrobatics strictly within the capabilities of their offspring, rising no more than half the height of those unencumbered by children.
The members of this school of dolphins spoke with voices perfectly audible to human ears; rarely when they were very close to the boat, but usually when they were heading straight away at a distance of a hundred yards or two. As they broke the surface with that strong forward-thrusting movement, one or more of their number would produce something between a shrill whistle and a squeak, on a single note held for perhaps two seconds. It seems strange that I can find no written record of any whale-sound as plainly and even obtrusively audible above water as this.
The Risso’s grampus, or more properly Risso’s dolphin, a few feet larger than the bottle-nose, visits Camusfeàrna bay in the summer too, but whereas in the shark fishery days I used to regard them as the sea’s clowns, perpetually at play in uncouth and incongruous attitudes, the parties that come to Camusfeàrna have by comparison with the bottle-nosed been sedate and decorous, almost always cows with small tubby calves, intent on the serious business of feeding and avoiding danger. They would not allow the boat nearly as close to them as would the other dolphins, unlike whom they seemed to resent human presence, and would soon leave the bay altogether if frequently followed.
Contrary to information contained in the majority of textbooks, in which Risso’s dolphin is described as a rarity, it is in fact the commonest of all the lesser whales to visit the Hebrides in summer. During my years in the shark fishery, when our chief catcher the Sea Leopard would cruise day-long in search of a different shape of fin, it was a rare week in which we had not met with half a dozen schools of them. As with most other species of whale, the fishermen have their own names for them, names that they sometimes, to the confusion of an enquiring scientist, use to describe several separate species, so that it is only by the comparatively very rare strandings of individual whales that the presence of a species becomes established. The ring-net men call Risso’s dolphin ‘lowpers’ or ‘dunters’, words deriving from the habit of seemingly aimless and random leaping. Neither Risso’s nor the bottle-nosed dolphins travel, as do the white-sided and common dolphins, by a series of long leaps low over the waves; both seem to jump only when they are at leisure and frolicking.
In fact it is not easy for an eye with any practice to confuse the fin of Risso’s dolphin with any other than that of a cow killer whale. ‘Cow’ is a strange feminine noun to give the most terrible animal in the sea; ‘bull’ is little better for her butcher mate, but the forms are fixed by long usage and must stand. Imaginations have strained to find a simile from land animals; the killer has been called the wolf of the sea, the tiger of the sea, the hyena of the sea, but none of these is really apt, and probably there is no other mammal of comparably indiscriminate ferocity.
Anyone writing of killer whales finds it necessary to quote the discovered contents of one killer’s stomach, and indeed those contents produce so immediate an image that they will, perhaps, bear one more repetition. That particular killer was found to contain no fewer than thirteen porpoises and fourteen seals. A gargantuan meal, one would say, for a leviathan, yet by comparison with the great whales the killer is a small beast, the bull no more than twenty-five feet overall and the cow a mere fifteen, while an adult porpoise is six feet long and the average among the seal species little less. Killers hunt in packs, and not even the great whales themselves are safe from them; the pack goes for the mighty tongue which in itself may weigh a ton, and when it is torn out the giant bleeds to death while the killers feed.
As I write there lies a few hundred yards down the shore the newly dead body of a brown seal. The forepart of the head has gone, where something has crunched through the skull in front of the eyes, and from one flank there has been ripped away a foot length of flesh and blubber, exposing the entrails. There are other possible solutions, though none of them likely; it is the typical work of a killer in killing mood. On Hyskeir the lighthouse men have told me how they have seen the killers slash seals for sport and not for food, and leave them maimed and dying among the skerries.
A killer or two comes every year to Camusfeàrna, but they do not linger, and if they did I would compass their deaths by any means that I could, for they banish the other sea
life from my surroundings; also I do not care to be among them in a small boat. There are many tales, but few, if any, authenticated records, of their attacking human beings; however, I do not want to be the first. Last year a single bull terrorized the tiny harbour of the Isle of Canna the summer through; John Lorne-Campbell shared my aversion to being a guinea-pig for dietary research among killers, and wrote asking my advice about its destruction. I smugly advised him to shoot it, and gave reasoned instructions as to the precise moment and bull’s eye, but I was thirty miles away, and I daresay my advice did not seem as sound and constructive on Canna as it did to me at Camusfeàrna.
My old quarry the basking sharks I have seen but seldom since they ceased to be my bread and butter, or rather my quest for bread and butter. The first basking shark with which I ever came to grips, sixteen crowded years ago was, by a strange coincidence, just out to sea from Camusfeàrna lighthouse, but in the ten years on and off that I have lived here since, I have only seen sharks on a bare half-dozen occasions, and most of them a long way off. No doubt they have often been showing at times when I was not there to see them. Only once have I seen them right close inshore, and then they were being hunted by my successors: I had been sitting up all night with my dog Jonnie, who was at the very edge of death, and I was too crushed with sadness and weariness to identify myself with that strange vignette of my past life.
The stages of Jonnie’s illness have become blurred in my mind; the two crises from which he made miraculous but ephemeral recoveries seem no longer related in sequence. I had been in London, and travelled to Camusfeàrna in the last week of April. Morag had telephoned to me to tell me that Jonnie was not well, and by the time I arrived he had developed pneumonia; he was a dog of enormous strength, but he was growing old, and his heart was not a young dog’s heart.
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy Page 7